Office Communications Server (OCS) has been out for some time now and the final pieces of the Unified Communications (UC) jigsaw will be launched on 16th October 2007.
Live Meeting 2007 falls inside the UC bucket and Microsoft have clearly been listening to their customers with this release. The interface is cleaner, less cluttered, more obvious and easier.
If I have OCS, do I need hosted Live Meeting 2007?OCS incorporates the Live Meeting 2007 client. However, the hosted version of Live Meeting 2007 has a bunch of features not available in OCS targeted at the Education and training market:
- Break out rooms – create breakout rooms on the fly, or in advance, and drag and drop attendees and resources
- Resources management – import resources from break out rooms into main meeting. See who has commented on resources.
- Testing facilities – test attendees and receive marks and run reports
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Registration/Event Management Service – Schedule meeting registration and publicity campaigns
It is expected that some OCS customers will use OCS for internal meetings and also Hosted Live Meeting 2007 for external meetings. There are a number of reasons why you would want to use both OCS and hosted Live Meeting 2007:
- Training – large enterprises already using OCS for presence and IM, adding Live Meeting 2007 as an extra service for all internal users is out of the box functionality.
- Running your own OCS infrastructure for both internal and external meetings is a huge undertaking to receive the same level of reliability and dependability that matches the hosted service.
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The hosted service requires no hardware or software investment and, if the last 2 years are anything to go by, seemingly 100% uptime. I have never known the hosted service to go down in the 2 years I have been selling it.
Features I like about Live Meeting 2007
- The interface is everything you wanted from Live Meeting 2005 and more.
- Using the Manage Resources feature, you can embed video, audio, office documents or whatever into one document that you can use for the whole meeting.
- Round Table is an exciting video conferencing device capable of a 360 degree panoramic view of the meeting attendees round the table.
- The breakout rooms are a genius idea and make a Live Meeting seem like a real event.
- The new colour palette is a step in the right direction, but a more customisable and granular system is needed.
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VOIP functionality in Live Meeting 2007 is fantastic, but it will remain to be seen which of the operators decide to turn this feature on, rather than provide a metered rate per minute for conference calling.
I am salivating at the release of Live Meeting 2007. Microsoft have already rolled out Live Meetng 2007 internally. Expect the hosted providers to roll this out some point in November.
